PostNuke
Flexible Content Management System
News
pnSEO - Postnuke Search Engine Optimization: Strategies and Methods
Something is not right. When I was reading an article in postnuke forum, the term seo came up. That's the time I started working on pnSEO.
I implemented some strategies one Sat. morning at 9:00am and have a tour of Washington DC. When I came back at 11pm, the ranking jumped from page 13 to page 1. What a surprise!
The following are the strategy I developed for promoting CCUS. Hope it is helpful and useful.
Read this: http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
2. Attitude: technique and marketing 20/80
Marketing is crucial to the success of your web site. pnSEO is part of marketing.
I would guess most people in pnCommunity will be like me: technical. Work on technical and enjoy to be technical. We may have spent 80% of our time on technical side. Setup the site, upgrade, add new functions, customization. Make the site look nice. But that's not the most important.
Do you have this experience: you work hours or days to add one module or add one function, or improve the interfaces, but no users are actually cared about it at all. This happened to me many times.
Before you start working on your web sites, think about effective and efficient. You are smart and hardworking, you maybe efficient, but are you working on the right thing (effective)?
Now 80% of the time should be spent on marketing. Start with pnSEO first.
3. Strategies
The following strategies are listed in the order of importance in my understanding.
SEO 1: SITEMAPS and Google Sitemaps.
This is the #1 strategy you should adopt. If you cannot do anything else, do this one.
It will overcome the shortcomings of CMS or dynamic sites such as Postnuke for search engines. It will let search engines to understand how your site is accessed by visitors.
"If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, you can use a Sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change." -- google.com
1.1 Create sitemap using google sitemap generator.
. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html
. Setup a schedule to resubmit your sitemap to google.
1.2 Use snakeseo to generate sitemap for Postnuke site.
SEO 2. use ShortURL and Remove session ID
Even yahoo.com is using short URLs. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/middleclassexilesstruggleforafoothold
2.1 Use shortURLs.
2.2 Enable Xnathia theme and enable shortURLs.
2.3 Remove session IDs from your postnuke site.
SEO 3. Title and Metadata
The page title weighs heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines, so be prepared to spend some time on it.
Page title should be accurate, keywords-rich.
Do not include stop words (and, the, a etc.) in the title. That just wastes space.
Meta tags may not be important as before. However, some search engines still looks at meta tags.
3.1 use pnTitle to make page title relevant to the page content
3.2 use pnMeta
3.3 use Xanthia theme
SEO 4: Directory submission
4.1 Submit to ODP
4.2 Submit to Yahoo
4.3 Submit to other directory services
4.4 Submit to all kinds of search engines
SEO 5. Exchange links with top PR (page rankingweb sites. (LINK100)
5.1 use Web Links module as a repository for all external web links
5.2 Find similiar sites using keywords. We use 'Chinese Community'. ALso try using "Suggest a Link + your keywords"
5.3 Request the webmasters to include anchor text, title that reflect the keywords you are promoting
e.g. Chinese Community
instead of http://www.ChineseCommunity.us
SEO 6. Publish Blogs.
Expand the existence of your web sites in the world wide web. Let it appear in as many places as possible.
6.1 Yahoo - http://360.yahoo.com
6.2 Google - blogger.com
6.3 MSN - spaces.msn.com
6.4 CCUS - blog.chinesecommunity.us
SEO 7: RSS (feeds) submission
SEO 8. Write and Submit articles to many sites, forums, discussions.
Write down the techniques, tips, strategies, experience you have into articles. In your artciles, you can have some links to your web sites. Also your website and keywords as part of your profile.
8.1 postnuke.com. Get involved with pnCommunity. Contribute your knowledge, experience, thoughts to the growth of the community.
8.2 ezinearticles.com
SEO 9. Develop modules/utilities for others to use.
9.1 Join pnCommunity to contribute
9.2 Put your module and URL on their web sites.
SEO 10: Page design
Try to develop some common sense that will help search engines.
10.1 All web links inside have titles and appropriate anchor text
example: ChineseCommunity.us should be changed as
Chinese Community .us
Why? Title include some keywords I am promoting for Chinese Community.us. Anchor text has "Chinese Community" as keywords. Search engines are very sensitive to title text and anchor text.
10.2 All images should include descriptive, keyword-rich alt text.
Don't make it very long though.
e.g.
instead of
10.3 Internal links
1) Every page on your site should link to at least one other page.
2) Include anchor text and title text for your internal links. They should contain appropriate keywords you are promoting.
3) e.g.
go to <a href="http://www.chinesecommunity.us" title="Chinese Community">Chinese Personals</a>
instead of
To go to Chinese Community, please click here
10.4 Use '-' instead of '_'
Google sees
chinese-community as chinese community
but it sees
chinese_community as chinesecommunity
10.5 No flash, splash, animation, rollovers etc. unless absolutely necessary.
10.6 No frames.
10.7 No JavaScript.
10.8 Include keywords inside your headings, such as H1, H3, H5
4. Do not overdo SEO.
You might get penalized and all your efforts will be wasted. Cloaking, hidden text will hurt your rankings in the long run. Build pages that the search engines will love (text-based, content-rich, tightly focused ) and you'll see the result.
Use your common sense to determine whether you are beyond the limit.
7272
I implemented some strategies one Sat. morning at 9:00am and have a tour of Washington DC. When I came back at 11pm, the ranking jumped from page 13 to page 1. What a surprise!
The following are the strategy I developed for promoting CCUS. Hope it is helpful and useful.
Read this: http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
2. Attitude: technique and marketing 20/80
Marketing is crucial to the success of your web site. pnSEO is part of marketing.
I would guess most people in pnCommunity will be like me: technical. Work on technical and enjoy to be technical. We may have spent 80% of our time on technical side. Setup the site, upgrade, add new functions, customization. Make the site look nice. But that's not the most important.
Do you have this experience: you work hours or days to add one module or add one function, or improve the interfaces, but no users are actually cared about it at all. This happened to me many times.
Before you start working on your web sites, think about effective and efficient. You are smart and hardworking, you maybe efficient, but are you working on the right thing (effective)?
Now 80% of the time should be spent on marketing. Start with pnSEO first.
3. Strategies
The following strategies are listed in the order of importance in my understanding.
SEO 1: SITEMAPS and Google Sitemaps.
This is the #1 strategy you should adopt. If you cannot do anything else, do this one.
It will overcome the shortcomings of CMS or dynamic sites such as Postnuke for search engines. It will let search engines to understand how your site is accessed by visitors.
"If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, you can use a Sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change." -- google.com
1.1 Create sitemap using google sitemap generator.
. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html
. Setup a schedule to resubmit your sitemap to google.
1.2 Use snakeseo to generate sitemap for Postnuke site.
SEO 2. use ShortURL and Remove session ID
Even yahoo.com is using short URLs. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/middleclassexilesstruggleforafoothold
2.1 Use shortURLs.
2.2 Enable Xnathia theme and enable shortURLs.
2.3 Remove session IDs from your postnuke site.
SEO 3. Title and Metadata
The page title weighs heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines, so be prepared to spend some time on it.
Page title should be accurate, keywords-rich.
Do not include stop words (and, the, a etc.) in the title. That just wastes space.
Meta tags may not be important as before. However, some search engines still looks at meta tags.
3.1 use pnTitle to make page title relevant to the page content
3.2 use pnMeta
3.3 use Xanthia theme
SEO 4: Directory submission
4.1 Submit to ODP
4.2 Submit to Yahoo
4.3 Submit to other directory services
4.4 Submit to all kinds of search engines
SEO 5. Exchange links with top PR (page rankingweb sites. (LINK100)
5.1 use Web Links module as a repository for all external web links
5.2 Find similiar sites using keywords. We use 'Chinese Community'. ALso try using "Suggest a Link + your keywords"
5.3 Request the webmasters to include anchor text, title that reflect the keywords you are promoting
e.g. Chinese Community
instead of http://www.ChineseCommunity.us
SEO 6. Publish Blogs.
Expand the existence of your web sites in the world wide web. Let it appear in as many places as possible.
6.1 Yahoo - http://360.yahoo.com
6.2 Google - blogger.com
6.3 MSN - spaces.msn.com
6.4 CCUS - blog.chinesecommunity.us
SEO 7: RSS (feeds) submission
SEO 8. Write and Submit articles to many sites, forums, discussions.
Write down the techniques, tips, strategies, experience you have into articles. In your artciles, you can have some links to your web sites. Also your website and keywords as part of your profile.
8.1 postnuke.com. Get involved with pnCommunity. Contribute your knowledge, experience, thoughts to the growth of the community.
8.2 ezinearticles.com
SEO 9. Develop modules/utilities for others to use.
9.1 Join pnCommunity to contribute
9.2 Put your module and URL on their web sites.
SEO 10: Page design
Try to develop some common sense that will help search engines.
10.1 All web links inside have titles and appropriate anchor text
example: ChineseCommunity.us should be changed as
Chinese Community .us
Why? Title include some keywords I am promoting for Chinese Community.us. Anchor text has "Chinese Community" as keywords. Search engines are very sensitive to title text and anchor text.
10.2 All images should include descriptive, keyword-rich alt text.
Don't make it very long though.
e.g.
instead of
10.3 Internal links
1) Every page on your site should link to at least one other page.
2) Include anchor text and title text for your internal links. They should contain appropriate keywords you are promoting.
3) e.g.
go to <a href="http://www.chinesecommunity.us" title="Chinese Community">Chinese Personals</a>
instead of
To go to Chinese Community, please click here
10.4 Use '-' instead of '_'
Google sees
chinese-community as chinese community
but it sees
chinese_community as chinesecommunity
10.5 No flash, splash, animation, rollovers etc. unless absolutely necessary.
10.6 No frames.
10.7 No JavaScript.
10.8 Include keywords inside your headings, such as H1, H3, H5
4. Do not overdo SEO.
You might get penalized and all your efforts will be wasted. Cloaking, hidden text will hurt your rankings in the long run. Build pages that the search engines will love (text-based, content-rich, tightly focused ) and you'll see the result.
Use your common sense to determine whether you are beyond the limit.